Overview

This documents how to build the Apache Geronimo Server project.

This guide is intended to cover how to build the latest server/branches/2.2. Refer to Building Apache Geronimo in the Development documents for more information on building Geronimo, including this and other branches.

Prerequisites

Java Developer Kit (JDK)

You will need a JDK 5.0+ (J2SE 1.5.0+) or compatible JDK to build Apache Geronimo. It is recommended you use SUN's implementation, or something compatible like Apples implementation. Other JDK vendors implementations may work, but use at your own risk.

Apache Maven 2

To execute the build process you need to have Apache Maven version 2.0.9 (or newer) installed. Note that Geronimo 2.2.x does not build with Maven 3.0 or above.

To check if your installation is working and you have the required minimum version run:

mvn -version

And it should produce something like:

Maven version: 2.0.9

If you have an incompatible version the server build will probably fail with a message complaining

maven repository

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Add the following to your settings.xml for maven so that you can avoid the redirect (and hence avoid the bogus poms/jars) and get beyond compilation failure problem to build Geronimo using maven. See this message for more details.

excerpt of setting.xml for maven

Subversion

To fetch the source code for the server, you will need to have a Subversion client version 1.2 (or newer, 1.4 is recommended) installed.

Windows Tip

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Windows users are strongly encouraged to change the M2 local repository (the place where dependencies are downloaded) to a shorter path with no spaces, e.g. C:\.m2.

Using a longer path may cause the build (and Geronimo itself) to behave very strangely when it hits the 260 char limit for filenames on Windows.

In order to change the m2 local repository go to %USERPROFILE%\.m2 and edit or create settings.xml file to contain the following content:

Windows users should create mavenrc_pre.bat under c:\documents and settings\<username>\mavenrc_pre.bat or c:\mavenrc_pre.bat depending on how the %HOME% property is set on your system.

Variables will need to use the batch set syntax:

set <VARIABLE>=<VALUE>

Building

To build all changes incrementally:

mvn install

To perform clean builds, which are sometimes needed after some changes to the source tree:

mvn clean install

Building Stages

In some cases you may need to build Geronimo in stages, such as when building OpenEJB from source to pick up local changes. Most users will not need to do this, but its documented here for clarity.

To build modules, testsupport and maven-plugins:

mvn install -Dstage=bootstrap

To build apps, configs and assemblies:

mvn install -Dstage=assemble

As mentioned, most users will not need to build Geronimo in stages. But in some cases, when bootstrapping new versions (when no artifacts are deployed into remote repositories for the current version), then you must build the stages separately for the first build and then for all builds afterwards, the staged build is not necessary.

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If you encounter errors downloading dependencies from the ibiblio maven mirror, adding the following to your settings.xml file may help avoid the problem:

Testing the Assembly

Once you have build the server fully, which will produce a number of zip and tar.gz archives from the assembly modules, you can use the geronimo-maven-plugin to start the server. From the project root directory run:

mvn -Ptools geronimo:start

Windows Tip

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Windows users may need to specify an alternative installDirectory to avoid long path problems:

mvn -Ptools geronimo:start -DinstallDirectory=c:\g

And to stop, either CTRL-C or from a separate terminal, from the project root directory run:

mvn -Ptools geronimo:stop

IDE Setup

The server project does not have any IDE files checked in, they are all generated by Maven plugins. Once you have checked out the server tree and built it once, you can generate the project configuration files for your IDE.

Intellij IDEA

For the basic IDEA configuration:

mvn idea:idea

To generate a configuration which includes dependency sources and javadocs:

mvn -Pdefault,idea

Eclipse

mvn -Pdefault,makeeclipse

Troubleshooting

If you're building the 2.0 branch and the build fails because it can't find an xbean jar (for example org.apache.xbean:xbean-naming:jar:3.2-r579367), then add the

http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/openejb/repo/

repository to the pom.xml file in the root of the source tree. See this messagefor more details.